Looking back, if there is one thing I could say made the biggest difference in my life it was a tip that my friend Paul Singh shared. The tip?

MEASURE EVERYTHING!

When I heard this I was a bit confused at first, what is there to measure? However, when he went to break it down into simplistic terms for me it started to make sense. In the most basic terms: assign a goal, set a deadline, track progress, and then review.

Come to think of it, the practice is used everyday in many aspects of our lives. It is used at school, work, home, etc.

Examples:

• When you join a weight-loss program you go in with the intention to lose some weight, so what do you do? You weigh yourself before, figure out how much nutrition you are getting, etc. and then you design a plan to help you loose some weight and get healthy and then a few weeks later you see the results.
• In school you want to pass and want to ensure you meet your degree requirements so you can graduate. So you learn, study, take quizzes/exams. In this case your progress is measured by your grades. Then your course grades get thrown into your transcript which then becomes your over all GPA. If your GPA meets your degree requirements you graduate.
• You want to save $500 a month, to put into savings. So you figure out in which areas you can cut back spending, you take action, discipline yourself to do it.  Essentially designing a plan that works for you so you meet your goal and tracking progress. (FYI, you can visit Ramit’s website to get some more information on personal finance.)

Now the question is what if you don’t meet those goals, then what? Well if you have done your job and kept track of all activity you can go back and see which methods worked best. Take those strengths and build on them. For example in this blog, if I see a trend in traffic coming in from search engines with the keywords “Young Entrepreneur” I am going to want to leverage that data. I will then make sure that my next few posts are based around the “Young Entrepreneur.” Then repeat the process with the next set of keywords.

How have I used this tip to better myself?

I used this method with my business, I wanted to keep track of things I was getting done on a day to day basis and then be able to go back at the end of the week/month/year and say this is what I accomplished and I made $X by doing “XYZ.”

Next, I used it in my personal life, I found myself spending too much time looking for things that should have been easy to find. The goal was to get organized to a point so if I needed to find a receipt from July 2008 that was charged to American Express I can easily recall and pull it, rather than go through a box of receipts that were unorganized. Every hour spent looking for something was cutting back from my productivity. In other words — I wasn’t making $$$, therefore making me fall short of goal number 1.

If I didn’t figure out how much time I wasn’t using to bill, I would not have been able to conclude that for being the reason I wasn’t able to reach my goal of making more money and spending less time stressing over things because I can’t find them (Thank you, David Allen). A simple change can take you a long way.

So now that I’ve got you thinking, I am sure you are wondering how you can apply it to your life? Simple, take any one thing you would like to improve, set a goal and measure your progress towards it. What change do you plan on measuring?